30% Cost Savings Driven by Design Discovery for Wayfair Flagship Store Device Strategy

Over four months, I directed the discovery process, during which we collaborated across 8 business units. We enabled our partners to use their areas of expertise to make decisions to support end users and mitigate risk and sunk costs. The decisions made during this process resulted in 30% projected hardware cost savings and improved processes.

Role & Responsibilities

Senior Experience Design Lead

Directed design discovery
Facilitated design sprint and activities to uncover connections and reduce risk
Lead internal research, prepped team for user interviews

Team

I was part of a cross-functional Tiger Team, which included a Project Manager, Product Manager, Business Operations, and Engineering partners

Collaborated closely with senior and executive leadership, as well as cross-team and department teammates

Remote, distributed
On-site visits about every 6 weeks

Timeline

4 months, part-time commitment

Month 1: Kick-off, Design Sprint

Month 2: —-

Month 3: —-

Month 4: —-

We needed to identify which devices were to be used, when, where, and why by our Store Employees so that we could order the necessary hardware for the first flagship store and adjust our roadmap, if necessary.

Customers are at the center of the experiences and services we provide in our stores. Store Employees use devices to fulfill their roles, which place the customer at the center. The devices they use need to support their responsibilities best.

1. ROLES, RESPONSIBILITIES

Workshops, SME Interviews

Discovery Miro Collected information from Warehouses (using similar tech)

2. APPLICATIONS + FORM FACTOR + STORE LOCATIONS

Synthesis, Role Cards and Hypotheses Support Team Stakeholder Alignment, Role Cards and Hypotheses

3. SPECIFIC DEVICE(S)

Define Specific Devices, Costs Learning Agenda, 👉Device Strategy (#/$), Scaling Comparison

Retail Review, Mar 24

4. LIVE VALIDATION

Align with SL and begin Bake-off Experiment

Experiment Agenda (2 parts) Test devices and vendors with Employee Tech Narrow choices Overlap with Printers and Devices/Stations -- with Store Builds team Retail Review

5. HIGHER FIDELITY VALIDATION

SRB interviews Vendor evaluation Further narrow choices Crunch numbers

6. RECOMMENDATION

Retail Review Resulted in: Decision to move forward with Google as hardware partner, 30% cost savings compared to current SRB device set Opportunity to expand hardware savings to Warehouses I transferred storage, check-in and check-out, communication strategy research, and information to another designer.

Resulted in: Decision to move forward with Google as hardware partner, 30% cost savings compared to current SRB device set

Opportunity to expand hardware savings to Warehouses

I successfully transferred storage, check-in and check-out, communication strategy research, and information to another designer on my team.

Involve teams in the business with similar needs sooner in the process (i.e., warehouse) - explore more value and savings in bulk (while we learned from their challenges with storage and communication, we could have joined in improving both experiences and business costs)

Less is more. Validating with representatives responsible for employees in place of employees (not-yet-hired) reduced the risk, created momentum, and increased the speed of decision-making

Keep involved and aware -- share solutions.

I learned…

Coordination across teams and functions
Maximizing…
Helping teams make decisions with quality input
Seeing and connecting bigger value across the business

If faced with a similar experience…

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